Hangovers finally getting worse in my 30s. Lasting days. Have I officially become old

Do you find that in your everyday life you are suppressing and blocking out fears, anxiety, depressing intrusive thoughts, emotions in general? If so, what might be happening is that when you land yourself in a hangover, you no longer have the mental resilience to continue to suppress and avoid all of the above and you get sucked into the dark bleak hole you are usually staving off in everyday life. That's been my experience of hangovers since I was 17 and I'm in my early 30s now.

It's strange; when growing up I never saw hangovers as depicted in popular culture eg. cartoons, tv shows, featuring what we nowadays describe as "the fear". My younger self imagined hangovers as being a more "wholesome" (for want of a better word) kind of suffering - just a sense of feeling physically sick and having a headache due to having too much fun. I didn't envisage it involving a dark, disturbed sense of wrongness with reality, an awareness of mortality and evilness about reality, a paralysed will, dissociation and numbness. I believe people nowadays experience hangovers worse than people in the past as the percentage of the population who live with what they would describe as "bad mental health" seems to have balooned since the late 2000s.

I never heard anybody, in my own life or in popular culture, describe the experience or set of symptoms we now describe as "the fear" during the mid 2000s or earlier (for example, on any of RTE2's night time shows, in the days before widespread internet use) - yet nowadays many people who have been badly hungover can relate to the description of it. I believe changes which have occurred since the late 2000s have rewired our whole experience of life and made the population in general more susceptible to bad mental ill, but that is a different discussion.

Since April of last year, I have only drank semi-heavily one night last summer, and had one or two beers a handful of times since then (as opposed to maybe two heavy nights out per month prior to then) and I feel much better for it. Having a long stretch of time free of alcohol gives you time to process your thoughts and resolve issues without having to keep starting from scratch every time you go on a mad one.